Chapter Twelve

They trekked on and on, slow, sluggishly, looking over their shoulders at the impassive wall of green behind them, half-wanting the Japanese to be there to put an end to the relentless anxiety. The trudge through jungle came to a halt as they watched Henry VIII toboggan on his haunches down a muddy bank into a dried-up riverbed. The rest followed, finding themselves in a sandy gulley with both banks above them steep walls of rock. At the start, the dried-up bed was much, much easier-going than the jungle and they made good progress on sand and cracked mud, picking their way through boulders as big as houses and side-stepping deep pools of water.

They walked on, locked inside the funnel of rock, the banks getting steeper and more forbidding as the riverbed twisted and turned. Halfway through the afternoon, a long, drawn-out rumble sounded from the north.

Thunder.

To Eddie Gregory’s ears practised, from his days with the gunners, it made a bigger noise than artillery, easily distinguished. The rain came, even harder than before, a relentless curtain of water falling, connecting up the deep pools by a thread, then a tracery, soon a blanket of water, until you’d take a step and plunge in down to your waist and struggle to hold upright. Thank God he’d parked all his kit, apart from his knife, in the big elephant’s basket.

Whoever the bright spark was who’d thought of taking a short cut along the dried-up riverbed hadn’t worked out what might happen if it started to rain, big-time. Because pretty soon the river wasn’t dried up at all, but running freely, the water level rising and rising fast. One inch, two inches. A trickle turned into a sluggish flow. Five inches, six inches. The flow started to move little stones, bits of dead wood began to be carried away by the current.

The rain thrummed down through the trees that arced overhead, the job of sloshing uphill against the current becoming harder, with every step.

Sick of plunging out of his depth, Gregory studied the great elephant’s progress. The animal never put a foot wrong. It must be something in the pads of the creature’s feet. When unsure of himself, the animal had a way of testing a step, to make sure it would carry the burden of his great weight, before he would move. But the elephant was even smarter than that. For much of the time the beast ploughed on up the stream, making quite good going, keeping an eye out for signs that the bed of the stream was sound. He could work out, Gregory realised, when he could walk steadily and when he had to slow down and take soundings. The oozies knew this, and never pushed the tusker when he suddenly stopped, and started dipping his toe into the water and testing his weight rather than plodding robotically on. If he ever got out of here, and sorted out that bitch of a schoolmarm, then he would have some tales to tell about his time with the elephants.

How long would they stay in the riverbed? Gregory raised his eyes and studied the slabs towering above them. Sheer rock, sprouting a bit of jungle here and there, a good thirty feet on one side, maybe a hundred on the other. If the river kept on rising at the current rate – and the stream was being fed from the hills and mountains to the north, where the thunder was coming from – then pretty soon it would be a forceful torrent, down which dead trees would come, smashing everything in their wake, and then they’d have to look out.

Reading the faces of the oozies, he could tell that they didn’t like it one bit. There was no panic, not yet, but a growing jitteriness amongst the Burmese. To prove the point, a biggish tree trunk idled past them, and then locked still for some seconds, a branch snagging on the bottom, before it spun free. As it passed Gregory, a high branch brushed against his face. He jerked his head away fast, but not fast enough, and the left side of his face bore a nasty tracery of scratches.

That set him thinking. The oozies by him were leading the most powerful elephant of the whole pack, walking with the fittest men, and they looked worried. Further down the march, the schoolgirls and the baby elephants, would be in trouble.

An opportunity, maybe, to settle things with the schoolmarm? No harm in taking a look, was there? Gregory made a thing of asking the lead oozie on the big one, using sign language, for his permission so that he could go back down the stream to see how the others were coping, whether they needed to quit the riverbed now. That was a bit academic, like, because they were trapped in the funnel of rock until it opened out. The oozie, high up on the tusker’s neck, grasped Gregory’s meaning, nodded, and the sergeant turned on his heel and began to saunter downstream. It was easy-going compared to slogging uphill, but every now and then something caught his feet underwater and he would stumble and stagger, working hard to keep upright. His boots filled with water but he didn’t dare risk taking them off lest he tread on something sharp. Remembering where the elephant had hesitated, he managed to avoid the deep sumps of water, and came to a bend in the riverbed. Far to the side was a kind of cave, a shelter made by a misshapen roof of rock and a spread of thick waxy ferns. Underneath the ferns the ground, standing proud of the stream, was dry-ish and quite comfortable to sit down on. He could rest, hidden behind the greenery, and people and elephants could pass him a few feet away and have no idea that he was watching them.

Smart. And so he sat down and waited to see who would pass by.

The Havildar came first, almost running, scowling, looking anxious, followed by a troop of pack elephants, moving faster than normal. Not running exactly, but kind of trotting, if elephants could be said to trot, calves skipping after mothers, little trunks flapping this way and that. Nearly all of the children were being carried in panniers, which was against Sam’s rules. By foot came a group of the older girls, Emily passing only a few feet from him, chatting to another girl, beak-nosed and lippy, a Jewess, and finally, there she was, the princess schoolmarm, rain plastering her blonde hair wet over her shoulders, her frock – once cream - a muddy brown and, to the delight of the secret watcher, all but see-through.

And what was bloody marvellous, she was alone.

Gregory checked upstream: all clear. The older girls had rounded a bend and had disappeared, out of sight.

Thirty feet away from him, blissfully unaware, she was walking towards him.

Now?